Inventor of the Renew Sports Car says he was “about seven years ahead of [his] time."

The cannabis car may never have hit the road officially, but its approach to reducing the carbon footprint still holds promise.

Created in 2015, the Renew Sports Car often referred to as the hemp car, featured “a carbon negative, hemp fiber body which was up to 46 per cent lighter than aluminum.”

Using carbon-negative fibre — of which hemp is the primary ingredient — would prevent two tons of carbon dioxide “from being dumped into our atmosphere,” the company website claimed.

A Renew Sports Car Facebook post from 2017 shows former Dell engineer turned inventor Bruce Dietzen, appearing on Jay Leno’s Garage, pounding the hood of the prototype vehicle, with a caption saying, “this car made from cannabis hemp is stronger than steel.”

The world-famous vehicle was introduced a few years back when Dietzen finalized the prototype, Autoevolution reports.

The idea was for the car to come in three styles, with even the non-electric variants running on bio-fuels from agricultural waste and the body made from woven hemp and bio-epoxy.

Dietzen once said the prototype cost him $256,000 in expenses and the same amount in lost revenue, the publication notes.

Despite the apparently great idea, Dietzen said in a note to Autoevolution that the vehicle is no longer in production and, indeed, only one unit besides his own was ever built.

He told the publication that it appears he was “about seven years ahead of [his] time,” pointing out that the current focus seems to be “bringing advanced versions of the hemp fabric to market for EV manufacturers to use to help them lighten their weight and carbon footprint.”

Research provider BloombergNEF noted in its latest Energy Transition Investment Trends report, released earlier this year, that global spending on EVs and charging infrastructure reached $349 billion in 2021, an increase of 77 per cent over 2020.

“Based on current trends, EVs are on course to overtake investment in renewables this year.”

The same report from a year earlier argued that “70 per cent of new vehicles will be EVs by 2040,” according to Car and Driver.

In Canada, mature industrial hemp stalks — when the leaves, flowers, seeds and branches are removed — are excluded from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Fibres derived from the stalks “can be imported, sold, possessed or used to make products, such as rope or fabric, without a licence, permit or other authorization,” notes Health Canada.

Legal Line adds to the list of potential products from hemp plastics, paper, building materials, biofuel, consumer goods and automobile manufacturing.

Back in 2018 in the U.S., industrial hemp received an apparent boost with the passage of the so-called Farm Bill. Although progress may not have been as dramatic as some would have hoped, hemp, which cannot contain more than 0.3 per cent of THC, allows for hemp cultivation broadly, according to Brookings.

Per Reuters, citing figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. farmers produced about $1.1 billion worth of industrial hemp last year.

Hemp is being used to make many different products, from a sports centre in France to planned homes in Colorado, plastic pellets, watches, tiny homes and even luge and bobsled tracks at this year’s Winter Olympics.